For Bush-Cheney-Rice, how to punish the Russian bear?

Lately, George W. Bush, his bunker-sequestered Svengali, Dick Cheney, and their dutiful, hapless, jet-setting lady-in-waiting, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have gotten a taste of Russian-style “shock and awe.” Now, confounded and frustrated, their heads are spinning as they try to figure out why they’re feeling so powerless in the face of Russian’s recent show of unstoppable force in the South Ossetia region of Georgia, its neighbor to the south.

This past weekend, relatives of a Georgian soldier from a town in western Georgia who was killed in the recent fighting with Russian forces mourned the loss of their loved one

“Wait a minute!” they’re saying in the Bush gang’s corridors of fast-diminishing power. “Aren’t the governments of other countries supposed to snap to it and do what we say as soon as we say it?”

Answer: Not anymore. As China’s breast-beating during the Beijing Olympics, Russia’s display of military muscle in a neighboring territory it regards as part of its historic sphere of influence and even the long, stubborn holding onto power (despite recent Washington criticism) of the just-resigned Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, have shown, the U.S. under Bush can kick and scream all it wants to about other countries’ actions and perceived abuses, but the U.S. under Bush has lost its moral authority and its relative position of esteem on the world stage. It’s no accident that while the Bush-Cheney-Rice hydra once again rattled its sabers during Russia’s recent incursion into Georgia (and had no leg to stand on with its you-can’t-invade-other-countries argument), it was France, along with Germany, that led the diplomatic effort to calm the Kremlin down.

Today, the Russian news service ITAR-TASS reports, “Russia will start…a withdrawal of its military contingent [from Georgia], reinforcing peacekeepers in the zone of the Georgian-South-Ossetian conflict….” This is what Russian President Dmitri Medvedev told French President Nicolas Sarkozy by telephone, the news agency notes, citing the Kremlin’s presidential news service. That bureau added: “The [two] heads of state agreed to continue regular contacts.”

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (left) met with Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, last Friday in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi

Yesterday, the Bush gang “accused Russia of stalling its military pullback in Georgia, but the Bush administration is not rushing to repudiate Moscow for its actions.” That’s because it “is struggling to figure out the best way to penalize Russia. It doesn’t want to deeply damage existing cooperation on many fronts or discourage Moscow from further integrating itself into global economic and political institutions. At the same time, U.S. officials say Russia can’t be allowed to get away with invading its neighbor.” Rice, trying to sound tough, said: “There’s no doubt there will be further consequences….” Rice briefed the vacationing Bush on the Russia-Georgia situation this past weekend at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Yesterday she returned to Washington and today she is scheduled to head to Europe “to talk with NATO allies about what message the West should send to Russia.” (Associated Press)

An Associated Press dispatch also notes: “Russia can’t use ‘disproportionate force’ against its neighbor and still be welcomed into the halls of international institutions, Rice said. ‘It’s not going to happen that way,’ she said. ‘Russia will pay a price.’”

What price? Extracted by whom? The AP report adds that “neither Rice nor [U.S.] Defense Secretary Robert Gates would be specific about what punitive actions the U.S. or the international community might take.” After all, even though the Bush gang “wants to take a tough stance against Russia,” there is “much at stake” in the current game of big-power, regional muscle-flexing. Senator Richard Lugar, the senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, observed: “The facts are that the United States has to work with Russia on Iran, on nuclear problems of proliferation, on a whole raft of trade issues at a time in which the United States has a huge domestic deficit.” Lugar was alluding to the fact that, essentially, the U.S. government is broke. It’s borrowing billions of dollars a day to pay for the endless, aimless Bush-Cheney wars and its most basic operating expenses. But how long will countries like China and Japan, who tend to buy the bulk of Washington’s debt in the form of U.S. Treasury-issued securities, keep investing in a rudderless, sinking ship? How can Washington dare to talk tough when, in many ways, under Bush’s watch, it has become so weak?

Russia is supposed to start withdrawing its forces from Georgian territory today; yesterday, Russian military vehicles were parked facing in the direction of Tskhinvali, the capital of Georgia’s breakaway province of South Ossetia, on the Russian side of the border with that region

Meanwhile, the Sunday Herald notes, as the Russia-Georgia conflict has unfolded, “powerful voices in Russia [have been] calling for the restoration of the Soviet Union.”

Huh?

The Scottish newspaper reports: “[Russian Prime Minister (and former President)] Vladimir Putin’s short, sharp lesson to challenging former Soviet state has unleashed patriotic pride in Russia and nostalgia for the glory days of the Soviet Union. The Kremlin’s brutal message to its former satellite states, and the West, that its great-power interests cannot be ignored, has delighted Russia’s nationalist masses. A new-found confidence is generating its own momentum, with calls for the restoration of the Soviet Union. Recognizing that the message has hit a nerve, Yevgeny Fedorov, the influential chairman of the Russian Duma’s parliament political economy house committee, has given weight to the pressure groups backing the initiative.” Last week, the Sunday Herald notes, Fedorov reminded the Duma (the lower house of the Russian Federation’s parliament) that “the forces behind Ukraine’s ‘orange revolution’ and Georgia’s ‘rose revolution,’” as he put it, using Kremlin code words for the U.S. and NATO, have, as the newspaper summed up his remarks, “greatly weakened Russia’s position in the Commonwealth of Independent States…, the pro-Russian rump of the former Soviet empire.” Fedorov said: “Russia must seek allies within the CIS with a view to re-establishing the concept of one nation, different states.’”

Yesterday, lightning could be seen flashing above a rubble-filled street in Tskhinvali, where buildings had been destroyed by a Georgian military strike

The Sunday Herald‘s report adds: “Recently, a secret conference, sponsored by the Kremlin, took place in Sukhumi, Abkhazia, Georgia’s other breakaway region. Representatives of Russian minorities from the Baltic states, Moldova’s Transnistria enclave, eastern Ukraine, South Ossetia and Abkhazia discussed the fate of breakaway regions. In their final resolution they warned that, ‘if the ‘historic role’ of Russia is ignored by the countries that had thrown off the yoke of communism, dangerous consequences will ensue.’”

The Independent calls the commotion that has been cooking in the Caucasus region evidence of a “new Cold War.” Yesterday, the British newspaper reported: “At the end of a tumultuous nine days, there was deep uncertainty about what [may unfold] next in the war in which Russian warplanes had bombed a European ally of the U.S. and revived the specter of the most tense days of the Cold War….Washington was still struggling to find an effective response to what it [had] condemn[ed] as blatant Russian aggression. Moscow, however, takes exactly the opposite view, and is exploiting the West’s discomfort to the hilt. It has seized the opportunity presented by the Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili’s ill-judged attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia to show that Russia will no longer tolerate NATO and Western encroachment on its sphere of influence. It rammed home that message last week by warning that Poland had placed itself at risk of attack – even nuclear attack – by agreeing to the installation of part of a U.S. anti-missile defense system [within Polish] territory, a plan that has long infuriated the Kremlin.”

The Bush gang, lacking “options to act on [its] tough rhetoric” was “caught by surprise – both by the Georgian action and the scale of the Russian reaction,” Janusz Bugajski, an expert on the region at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, told the Financial Times. The newspaper notes: “Critics of U.S. handling of the crisis and events leading up to it divide into two camps: those who believe the Bush administration provoked Russia by aligning itself too closely with Georgia, and those who believe it did not stand up to Moscow strongly enough. Both camps agree, however, that the U.S. delivered mixed messages to Georgia by cautioning it against military action in private while championing its cause in public, and that Washington failed to pay sufficient attention to the brewing crisis.” Bugajski, “blaming the [Bush] administration’s preoccupation with the Middle East and terrorism,” told the FT: “There has been no vision or strategy to bring together the different elements of policy toward the region and no common front with Europe….”